Large file sizes

I've had ATI 11 for 2 weeks and I am backing up to a 500G external drive. My purpose is to have a backup for disaster recovery. I have 2 drives I am backing up; an 80G (43G used) and a 120G (60G used) mostly music, photos and video. I made a full backup that was 90g using normal compression. I then made an incremental backup that was 90G. My plan was to make a full backup every 2 weeks with 2 incrementals in between the fulls. I only have 400G allocated for this on my external drive so the math says I can only make 4 full backups.
Question 1: are the incremental backups supposed to be the same size as the full backup? If this is the case I might as well just make a full backup every week and forget the incrementals.
Question 2: is it OK to backup both of my drives to the same image or should I make separate backups, one for each drive.
Any help is appreciated.

The incrementals should typically be much smaller. One thing that upsets programs like TI is anything that moves data sectors on the disk such as a defragger. To TI a moved sector is exactly the same as a changed sector so it will be included in the incremental. Did you run a defrag between the last backup and the incremental?

You can put both backups in the same archive. It might be slightly riskier in that some screw-up might render the whole archive useless but I don't know if it is worth getting excited about.

Have you done a test restore to a spare drive to ensure that you can indeed recover your system if it fails? If you don't want to do that, although you should, the next best thing is to boot up the TI rescue CD and validate the archives on your external. Validating in Windows is not good enough until you know validates work with the Linux TI rescue CD.

Thanks for your input seekforever. Yes i did do a defrag. I am running another incremental now to see if it is smaller this time. When you say run a test restore on a spare drive could I do that on one of my existing drives if there is enough room or does it need to be totally separate?

If you restore a partition/drive, it will overwite whater is curently on the target partiton/drive.

sh

shumik99 said:

Thanks for your input seekforever. Yes i did do a defrag. I am running another incremental now to see if it is smaller this time. When you say run a test restore on a spare drive could I do that on one of my existing drives if there is enough room or does it need to be totally separate?

To add to sheiber's post, everything you do that gets closer to what you need to do is better. If your plan, like most people's, is to be able to replace your system in case of a HD failure, then the absolute best test is the spare drive. This not only tests the restore but also ensures that the replaced disk is bootable and does run as intended.

New HD's are relatively cheap these days but if you don't have the money, you don't have the money! Borrowing a spare HD from a friend is not out of the question and if you buy a HD for the test, you can for a bit more money buy an external USB enclosure and have an extra backup drive after testing is done. IMO, it is always a good idea to have more than one backup device that is rotated in the backup sequence. Even if you have 100 backups on a drive you still have a potential single-point of failure which can render all 100 inaccessible.

The other obstacle is that some people don't want to mess with the guts of their machines and I can't really fault them for that. In that case, you have to consider just how you are going to handle a HD failure and then work that scenario into your test sequence. So if it means taking the PC and your backup to the local PC store, friend, or getting out the "how to install a HD" manual then that is part of the restoration test as well. It is easier to test things out on a machine you know is working than one that has gone bad.

I discovered why my incrementals were so large. After reading through more of the forums I realized I made a common nooby mistake. It was because I used the wrong backup location, and even though I had selected incremental, TI made a full backup. Very easy to miss this step. Now that I am using the proper backup location my incs. are around 100 MB instead of 90GB. This brings up another question. When using the wizard to create the backup locations I select the one at the top of the tree which points to my external drive but it does not allow me to create a folder. In the target folder text box it says "No file name is required in this area" so my backups are going straight to my ext. drive. I'm sure it doesn't matter but I would prefer to have the backups in a folder on the drive. Is there a way to accomplish this? I am afraid that if I make any changes while using the wizard I will be back to where I started. Thanks.

Have you done a test restore to a spare drive to ensure that you can indeed recover your system if it fails? If you don't want to do that, although you should, the next best thing is to boot up the TI rescue CD and validate the archives on your external. Validating in Windows is not good enough until you know validates work with the Linux TI rescue CD.

Click to expand...

Seekforever, I'll do my testing once i have the backup down pat. Thanks again.

Please notice that you can create a folder and assign it as an Acronis Backup Location. Then, when you make backups to that location, they will be stored in that folder. Please notice that you can find detailed information on how to use Acronis Backup Locations in chapters 3.5 "Acronis backup locations" and 8 "Backup location management" of Acronis True Image 11 HomeUser's Guide.